Behind the Façades in France: What expats and the mainstream media (French and American alike) fail to notice (or fail to tell you) about French attitudes, principles, values, and official positions…

Saturday, January 12, 2013

Russia has always needed its Depardieus, just as much as they needed Russia

RETURNING home from a visit to Russia in 1774, the philosophe
Denis Diderot wrote that in France, he could not “help but think that
I’ve the soul of a slave in a country where men are called free,”
whereas in Russia he “had the soul of a free man in a country where men
are called slaves.”

On Sunday, President Vladimir V. Putin welcomed
the French actor to Russia with a newly issued Russian passport. Mr.
Depardieu, outraged by the French Socialist government’s proposed 75
percent wealth tax, had walked out on his country. A fan of Russia’s low
taxes, he also praised its “great democracy”: “I love your country,
Russia — its people, its history, its writers. I love your culture, your
intelligence.” Mr. Putin’s increasing authoritarianism went
unmentioned.

In the centuries since French celebrities began washing up on its
shores, Russia has used them to affirm itself as a center of European
culture, as well as to poke its finger in the eye of Western nations.
Russia has always needed its Depardieus, just as much as they needed Russia.

Diderot’s reasons for visiting were not terribly different from Mr.
Depardieu’s. Catherine the Great had repeatedly expressed her desire to
meet the celebrated philosophe. In an age of enlightened
despotism, when kings made a show of seeking the guidance of
philosophers on how best to rule, such an invitation was hard to ignore.
This was certainly the case for Diderot, editor of the Encyclopédie,
whose entry on government affirmed that the laws of nature and reason
must guide rulers in bettering the lot of the people, for whom the
greatest good is liberty. …

The more pressing motivation, however, was financial:
Diderot was broke.

… La mission civilisatrice — France’s civilizing mission — was
nevertheless started in Russia, and furthered by a wave of French
celebrity émigrés fleeing the very event for which thinkers like Diderot
were held responsible: the revolution. Few countries seemed safer for
French aristocrats than reactionary Russia.

… A new generation of French intellectuals and artists arrived after 1917,
the revolution that grew out of 1789. The Surrealist Louis Aragon, who
toured Russia in the 1930s, was just one who was dazzled by what he
wanted to see. He praised the science of the re-education of man
unfolding in Stalin’s gulag, while in his notorious poem “Red Front” he
urged, in Lenin’s name, the massacre of France’s bourgeois political
leaders.

Set alongside these remarks, Mr. Depardieu’s sallies on Russian
democracy are mostly silly. But they also have a history. From
enlightened despotism through absolute autocracy to Soviet communism,
Russia has been a screen against which France has projected its
ideological or merely idiosyncratic dreams. That these dreams have
proved nightmares for those who really lived them is, of course, beside
the point for Russia’s leaders.

And — beside the point for the Frenchmen escaping to, and lauding, Russia…

And, while we are on the subject: Plantu, bringing in the parallel issues of gay marriage advocates versus traditional marriage supporters (currently heating up in France) as well as of Gégé's court case for driving intoxicated on a motorcycle:

After the school war, the fiscal war
• Nounours with his new Russian passport:
Long live Orthodox marriage…